Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

11
Conclusion
Introduction
We commenced this book with a challenge: what would the state look like if
governments were to rely almost exclusively on vouchers to deliver public goods and
services across the broad spectrum of activities that comprise the modern welfare state?
We sought to address this issue by considering how governments actually deliver public
goods and services in a range of different policy areas, being particularly attentive to the
normative rationales for intervention in each of these areas, to the instrument mix
currently being used by government to realize public goals, and to their performance. It is
against this backdrop that we considered the prospects for the voucher. In case after case,
we argued that, providing that sponsoring governments are steadfastly attentive to
demonstrating fidelity to public goals and values through their design, implementation
and monitoring of voucher programs, the voucher possesses considerable promise as an
instrument of public policy. Vouchers can, we believe, achieve a more satisfactory
optimization of efficiency and equity goals than many competing instruments.
Nevertheless, despite the demonstrated promise of the voucher in a number of
different policy contexts, the various challenges for government in creating publicly
accountable and normatively robust voucher programs ought not to be underestimated.
We have seen that the design, implementation and monitoring responsibilities that
governments must vindicate in the creation and support of these programs are not trivial
either in normative or political terms. In terms of the former, it is inconceivable that
normatively defensible voucher programs can be created without confronting a series of
difficult and often contentious issues relating to the scope, scale and operation of the
proposed program. In terms of the latter, vouchers, particularly where they displace
existing modes of public delivery, cannot help but elicit strong stakeholder antipathy. It is
here that ideas and interests are intimately linked. To the extent that vouchers force a
wrenching and normatively contentious consideration of core public interests and goals in
a discrete policy area, this is likely to serve as fodder for the innate stakeholder
opposition to the proposed policy reforms. After all, stakeholders having vested interests
in the perpetuation of the status quo will enjoy much greater political traction when they
appeal to public goals and values that are congruent with their personal interests, rather
than simply relying on strenuous and naked assertions of their narrowly defined selfinterest.
The intensity of this combination of entrenched and salient interests and
normatively vexing design, implementation and monitoring issues explains why
government by voucher on the scale we have envisaged has yet to arrive. Put simply,
governments have only a limited amount of political capital to invest in any major policy
reform initiative, and the normative and political challenges of vouchers dictates that
these initiatives can only be done in an incremental, piecemeal fashion. Thus, in